


What made Angel and Buffy Innovative, and why I prefer one to the other...

by shadowkat67



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Criticism, Essays, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Literary References & Allusions, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-07
Updated: 2014-10-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:54:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22408273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadowkat67/pseuds/shadowkat67
Kudos: 1





	What made Angel and Buffy Innovative, and why I prefer one to the other...

Read the following bit online: _AtS is better than BtVS. "If Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show about becoming, then Angel is about something far more challenging: existing. There is a rot to the world, one that threatens to infect us all—not in grand, dramatic ways, but mundane ones. Entropy and inertia are the natural order of things. According to Holland Manners, the world doesn’t work in spite of evil—it works with it"._

Eh, the two series are so completely different in tone and style, that it is akin to saying an apple is better than a pear. You either prefer the pear or the apple, but one is not necessarily better than the other. I personally prefer apples - I like the crunch and variety, pears are too mushy. Not a fan of mushy texture. Also pears are sweeter and have a higher inflammatory index. But I know lots of people who prefer pears.

My brother never understood why I preferred Buffy to Angel. He thought Angel was more adult (eh, not really - well not if you include the last four seasons of Buffy, which he wasn't fond of.) Also, my sister-in-law and brother never understood why my mother and I preferred Spike. My mother didn't like Angel and could never get into the series that bore his name, because in part she found the character uninteresting and the actor wooden. While my brother and sisinlaw loved the series, and found Angel adorable. Also they found the physical comedy on Angel hilarious, while it tended to fall flat for me - but the witty by-play and absurdist comedy on Buffy had me laughing out loud.

My father, on the other hand, blissfully ignored both series and watches NCIS instead. Never been a fan of fantasy serials.

We don't discuss it much. But it is interesting - how people swear one series is better than another, when if fact they are merely just pointing out a preference which has zip to do with any objective criteria whatsoever. I mean, I can argue both are excellent and both are campy cheesy serials, with little effort.

I do however think that of the two, Buffy was far more innovative. Let's face it - Angel has been done multiple times. _Brimstone_ (short-lived), _Koljack the Night Stalker_ , _Forever Knight_ , _Moonlight_ , etc. The most innovative take on the whole Angel trope is probably the serial _The Originals_ , which isn't nearly as well written or captivating. But _Buffy_? I can't think of anything that resembles _Buffy_ past or present. The closest might have been _Veronica Mars_. _Vamp Diaries_ \- is more about the vampires, not about a girl's coming of age story fighting them. And is there any female superhero shows on at the moment? Not that I can think of. In the past? Maybe _Wonder Woman_ or _Dark Angel_ \- but neither featured quite the type of character line up that Buffy had. No, I think one of the reasons I became a die-hard fan of _Buffy_ in a way that I have not become a fan of anything else before or since, is that it just broke the mold or stood outside of the trope, often making fun of or satirising the tropes it found itself in. It just was so different. And unlike a lot of tv shows, never sat on its laurels or phoned it in - the writers kept experimenting and playing with the narrative form. I can't think of many tv shows that have done all of that.

So yes, from that perspective _Buffy_ was the more innovative and interesting series. _Angel_ was a spin-off that initially followed a fairly safe and traditional anti-hero noir detective trope. What _Angel_ did do that separated itself from the pack, however, is it became highly serialized and built a mythology. It also played a little with the trope and commented on it, often making fun of itself in the process, particularly in the latter (and in my opinion at least far more interesting and innovative) seasons.

Actually if you think about it - both shows have that in common. The initial seasons sort of follow a standard and somewhat formulaic traditional television trope. A gang of high-school kids fight and occasionally fall in love with monsters, and the monsters reflect the nasty high school issues they are dealing with. That has sort of been done before and after Buffy - Vampire Diaries was sort of that trope, Hex, and a few others. Albeit not as often as the supernatural noirish lone detective trope has been done (the latest entry to that fold is _Constantine_ and well _Sleepy Hollow_ , _Gotham_ , and _Supernatural_ ). _Angel_ started out that way, then sort of drifted away from it - making a law firm of all things the main villain. Normally it's other vampires, family members, demons, or some criminal mob boss - but here it was lawyers and their ability to create order through "laws". Angel tackled order, law, regulations, and control as problems. The Authority - was always the main problem for Angel, the monster or demon that had to be overcome - whether that authority was religious in nature (ie. God or the PTB), legal (the evil law firm WRH), or societal pressures. The phrase "Everybody thinks this is a good idea" - was often the opposite on Angel. And this was in a way what set Angel apart from it's predecessors who often focused on chaos as the bad guy. In Forever Knight - the lead character was a cop, and the monsters were people outside of the police force. On Angel - the bad guy was the police force.

 _Buffy_ was similar in a way - it too had issues with Authority.  The Mayor was one the major villains in the series. As was the Watcher Council - who could not be counted on and often did more harm than good. Buffy was in some respects based heavily on the Western Trope of the lone gunfighter who comes into town to fix it up, the police, mayor, principal, council - all being a bit on the shady side and part of the problem. It's notable that when Buffy finally becomes an authority figure herself - she becomes her own worst enemy and must blow the town apart along with her image, until she becomes once again - the fighter, not the leader of an increasingly bureaucratic and fascist system.

While it's tempting to think that the writers/creators of these series have been reading a wee bit too much Ayn Rand in their spare time, I don't believe this to be the case. For one thing, not all authority is circumspect, nor is the individual always right. In Rand's universe - as satirized recently online, Buffy would not suffer the aid of Xander or pre-witch Willow. She would do it on her own. And she'd demand to be paid for it. (Although to be fair, I always thought the Council should have given her some compensation. I don't buy into the naive and somewhat childish theory that superheros should save people for free or out of pure altruism - when they have no income and aren't independently wealthy. Heck, soliders, firemen, and cops don't. Support your local sheriff. But that's beside the point and has zip to do with Rand, who was a bit of an extremist in her views. Probably the result of growing up in Stalinist Russia. A good and nasty dictatorship could turn anyone into an extremist.) At any rate - the rebellion against Authority or the Powers that Be is certainly not a new concept and not limited to Whedon or even Rand, although I think Rand had more problems with people who wanted to be taken care of - than authority per se, as long as she was the authority. Phillip Pullman certainly tackles similar issues with his controversial series of children's books entitled _His Dark Materials_ \- where a couple of kids challenge The Authority or the organization supporting HIM, the Authority doesn't appear to be around. An idea that has been borrowed to a degree by _Supernatural_ \- where Dean and Sam, demon hunters extrordinare, equally question the unknowable and notably absent Authority - and his crumbling organization of angelic followers. Or George Orwell and Adolus Huxley who warn of the dangers of trusting an Authority too much with our basic freedoms and rights in the sci-fi novels _1984_ and _Brave New World_ respectively.

But just because it's not a new idea, does not mean you can't be innovative. After all, to borrow an old adage from copyright law, there are no new ideas or even original ones, just new ways of playing with them. What Angel and Buffy did differently was how they envisioned the Authority, and dealt with the struggle to defeat it - discovering to both their considerable chagrin - that when they did finally overthrow or seemingly overthrew the Authority, someone or something had to fill the vaccume left behind - and in both cases it turned out to be Buffy and Angel.  
When they became the Authority or guy/gal in charge - things didn't quite work as they thought. They found themselves making some of the same mistakes the authority figures they spent so much time fighting had made. In the end, the only escape, was to blow it apart. Creating another problem - chaos.

Unlike most series, there is no neat ending here. Buffy blows up her town, shares her power, journey's off into the horizon - but is suddenly responsible for all those girls she empowered and the consequences of unleashing them into the world with no rules or authority to train or hinder them. Angel similarly blows up the law firm, and is dumped into Chaos...with hell raining down on him.

The writer's don't provide neat answers. Just questions. Destroy the authority, do we become it? And what then? The child rebels against the adult order, only to become that order...Neither extreme works, and both try to work towards the happy medium.

Most series don't appear to explore it to quite that degree or in quite that fashion. Since Buffy and Angel don't just tackle religious order but also societal order. Most series seem to stop short somewhere along the road. And that may be how these differed at least to me.

Your Mileage May Vary of course.


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